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Early humans organized their minds and thoughts around basic distinctions that we still make and find useful. One of the earliest distinctions made was between now and not-now; these things are happening in the moment, these other things happened in the past and are now in my memory. No other species makes this self-conscious distinction among past, present, and future. No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones. Of course many species respond to time by building nests, flying south, hibernating, mating--but these are preprogrammed, instinctive behaviors and these actions are not the result of conscious decision, meditation, or planning.

"the history of human technological civilization is measured in centuries--and it may be only one or two more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence, which will then persist, continuing to evolve, for billions of years. ... We would be most unlikely to 'catch' it in the brief sliver of time when it took organic form."

Humans have been around for 200,000 years. For the first 99% of our history, we didn't do much of anything but procreate and survive. This was largely due to harsh global climatic conditions, which stabilized sometime around 10,000 years ago.

Charles Darwin elegantly explained why: since the most efficient copiers outcompete and dominate the others, before long any random life form you look at will be highly optimized for the goal of replication.

As social animals, we feel the need to have value to society. We're unable to live without feeling that there's some meaning to our existence through the recognition or acknowledgment of others.

If we don't improve our technology, the question isn't whether humanity will go extinct, but merely how: will an asteroid, a supervolcano, the burning heat of the aging Sun or some other calamity get us first?